Little Pretty Things by Lori Rader-Day

, not until last night. I heard she lived in Chicago—”
    Courtney leaned forward. “Who told you that?”
    “Shelly. The reunion’s coming up.” Shelly, our class president, used her bank window as a throne from which to maintain control of her subjects. If I didn’t RSVP to the reunion soon, I wouldn’t be able to deposit my paycheck without getting a lot of attitude. Of course, with the Mid-Night closed, maybe the greater concern was when I’d ever see a paycheck again.
    Courtney fell back against her seat, less rigid through the shoulders. “Shelly. Right. Are you going to the reunion?”
    “I wasn’t planning to. What about you?”
    She reached for a paper coaster on the table and worried it between her fingers. “I don’t have much to say to those people.”
    “Those people?”
    “My high-school years don’t need to be revisited,” she said.
    “Your high-school years and mine were the same years.”
    “Not by a long shot.”
    “Come on,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad.”
    Her glare cut through me. “For you, it wasn’t that bad. For Maddy. You were too busy being track superstars to notice anyone else. The rest of us were just blurs.”
    Now I remembered.
    The headline had read something like And Everyone Else Is a Blur . It was something dumb Maddy used to say. I’d never given it much thought until she’d said it during an interview with the school paper. In big, black print, it sounded ugly and stuck-up. And people had taken it seriously. Even a few of the other runners had given us a pass after that. Maddy and I laughed it off, but we knew damage had been done. We couldn’t really blame the newspaper—nothing in the article had been wrong or misquoted.
    But we could blame the student reporter, who’d been waiting for a gotcha, and had constructed one out of nothing. That reporter had come to the interview with a chip on her shoulder. Maybe she had today, too.
    “You always read more into that phrase than she meant,” I said.
    “I report what people have the lack of self-awareness to say in front of me. Then, and now.” Courtney pulled out her notebook and flipped it open. “Why weren’t you friends with Maddy anymore?”
    I looked at the pen’s tip on the blank page, then away. “People fall out of touch. Are you still friends with everyone you hung out with in high school?”
    “I didn’t hang out,” she said. “I liked to think of it as doing time. Did you have a fight?”
    “When?”
    She smiled at me in a way I didn’t like. “Back in high school?”
    “No.”
    “Last night, did you have a fight?” she said.
    “No.”
    She waited.
    “Not exactly,” I said.
    “Tell me what happened.”
    What had happened? We’d compared plans to avoid the reunion, disagreed on how time passed, and then she’d riled me up with her inability to see what separated us. What had always separated us. “She accused me of being jealous of her,” I said.
    “Were you?”
    The only thing Maddy had ever done that I wasn’t jealous of was getting killed. “Of course I was. She won every race, ever.”
    “Except that last one.” Courtney looked up from her notes. “Why didn’t she run that last race again?”
    “She was sick,” I said.
    “What kind of sick?”
    “I don’t know. Sick sick.” I got up and walked behind the bar. I had always hated everything about this story, and I didn’t want to tell it. Afterward, everyone had wanted to know. What happened? What had gone wrong? But by then I’d been shunned long enough because of Maddy’s blur comment, and I didn’t owe anyone anything. Nobody needed to know. Nobody cared, really, and the few who did just wanted the dirt. But there wasn’t any. “You want a Coke or something?”
    I aimed the bar’s soda gun at a pint glass. I didn’t want to remember, but it came anyway—the image of Maddy, curled into a ball on the edge of the hotel bed, the garish bedspread gathered in her fist.
    That morning I’d woken to find